METAPHORS
**ESPECIALLY USEFUL IN HELPING PEOPLE MORE FULLY ABSORB IMPORTANT POINTS.**
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TOPICS FOR METAPHORS
1. Validating Emotional Reactions 2. Closing Emotional Wounds (1 + 2) 3. Staying in the Moment 4. Motivation For Treatment 5. Gaining Emotional Strength 6. Compliance for Younger People 7. Creating Your Own Well Being (Empty Barrel) 8. About Neuroplasticity (1 &2) 9. Therapist/Client Equality 10. Letting go of the Last Pieces of a Problem 11. Validation for obstacles interfering with progress. 12. Hand in my pocket A. Morrisette 13. Childhood options no longer effective 14. The Tortoise and the Amygdala
1. Purpose – To validate intense emotional reactions
How many times have you heard: what’s the big deal, chill out, you’re overreacting, what the hell is your problem, you get upset over nothing…? You might also wonder why every little thing upsets you when other people just take things in stride. You may feel that people want to cause you pain. Whatever you think, feel or hear, you know that your pain is not understood and that people judge you for overreacting. You may be someone who learned long ago to conceal your pain, but either you still feel it inside or you’ve learned how to quickly escape uncomfortable feelings. Imagine that you have a big bruise on your upper arm. You are wearing a shirt with sleeves concealing the bruise. A buddy comes over and says hello while giving you a light fist bump right on your arm where the bruise is. You jump, scream ouch and grab your arm. Your buddy wonders why you’ve reacted so strongly. Considering that the bruise was hit, even if hidden, your reaction would be appropriate and proportionate. People with a history of trauma often have so many emotional bruises that they go through life watching for any potential of being poked so they can protect themselves preemptively. If they are unable to protect the bruise, they may then become defensive or emotional in reaction. Mission It is very likely that when those bruises were formed they were due to people who were abusive or indifferent. Today people may say things not meaning to cause harm or believe something to be neutral, but you feel it as abuse. If people don’t know about the bruise – (you never lift your sleeve) they will not understand your reaction. Learn to differentiate between what is intentional and what is not and you may save yourself a lot of pain. 2/1. Purpose - Closing Emotional Wounds Just like a physical wound, as long as it remains open it is susceptible to germs. A wound will stay open if it is regularly attacked by the elements. Imagine a big cut on your arm. Nothing is protecting it and you are just trying to ignore it as you work in your garden. Dirt is getting in it, bugs are attracted to it, you might rub against something that pulls at it, you are vulnerable to airborne contagions. You might scratch it with dirty finger nails. It is only going to increase the risk of the wound becoming bigger. An emotional wound that is ignored will also grow in size. You are vulnerable to being triggered by so many things, which all result in the wound growing larger and your world becoming smaller. If gardening causes more harm to the cut on your arm, you will stop gardening. If it is possible that your emotional wound could be attacked by people you encounter, you will stop going out in public. Mission A cut needs to be cleaned out and covered until scar tissue forms. You may have to live with the scar and that is a reminder, but dirt and germs will gloss over it without creating additional harm. Facing a memory, getting it out and having it acknowledged, learning the truth about it and figuring out how to move on past it, will result in it being a memory which may always be painful, but it no longer affects your ability to live in the present. 2/2. PURPOSE - Closing Emotional Wounds Imagine having a serious allergic reaction and landing in the ER. The doctor gives you a shot of epinephrine or Benadryl. You are back to normal. The doctor questions what you have been eating or have encountered, to learn the allergen that created the reaction. You are resistant because you fear having to give something up or change your activities. How many times in the future will you end up in the ER because you don’t want to face the real problem? Mission Remaining in denial can result in frequently being triggered. Quick fixes such as: self-harm, venting, drinking, distracting; are band-aid solutions that will forever need to be relied upon. If you open yourself to finding the origin of the triggers, you will not spend your life with the tension and effort needed to fend off the inevitable pain and difficult reactions. You will be healing the core problem, which will eventually diminish the triggers from occurring or at least significantly decrease their impact. 3. Purpose - Staying in the moment With athletes they are putting themselves out there to perform every day. Their life is competition. The only way they can win the next point, the game, the match, the field goal is to stay precisely focused on the moment they are in. Every athlete stumbles, gets errors, has wild throws. If a batter is thinking about how he struck out last time at bat or returning home after the game to his wife he has been fighting with, chances are he will not do well this time at bat either. If he only thinks about right now, watching the pitcher and the ball coming to him he has a chance of a home run. 4. Purpose - It’s important to stay with treatment no matter how hard it gets. Going through a course of therapy, especially when there has been trauma, can be like a cancer patient going through chemotherapy. You may not know how sick you are. You’re just a little tired lately and you go to the doctor. You are diagnosed with cancer. You have something inside you eating up all your good cells. It may kill you if you do nothing. You begin the treatment and now you feel really sick. You feel much worse than before you were diagnosed. If you can survive the pain of the present and stick with it - when it’s done - you will be cancer free and have the rest of your life ahead of you. Mission It's painful to heal the past but may be the only path to a healthy future. 11. Purpose - Validation for obstacles interfering with progress. Imagine a turtle who was injured early in life and it's head was stuck inside it's shell. It managed to survive somehow, but not without pain, discomfort, fears and isolation. After working on healing the injury, finally the head loosens and emerges. There is sunlight and green trees, blue, sparkling water, and other turtles. It is all amazing and the turtle thinks "I am never returning inside my shell". Then one day something comes along and shoves the head back in the shell, re-injuring the turtle. The despair is intense. It remembers how life used to be. It's even hard to imagine that any of the world outside was even real. Something is different though. It remembers how it freed it's head the first time and all it has learned since. The turtle frees it's head once more, this time more quickly and easily. Mission The road to recovery is not a straight line. One needs acceptance that healing will have challenges and moments of doubt and fear. Obstacles can be internal or external. Life will throw things at you that shows how healing can be fragile, but it strengthens with time. When it seems all is lost - it's not. 12. Hand In My Pocket - Alanis Morrisette |
5. Purpose - Gaining emotional strength is a slow process Think about chocolate pudding, not the instant kind. It is put in a bowl while it is still soft and placed in the refrigerator to settle. As it does a skin develops over the top. The skin is stronger than the pudding underneath and can hold the weight of a spoon placed gently upon it. If you were to bash a spoon on the top of it before the skin was very thick it would go right through to the soft part. The longer you allow it to settle the thicker the skin becomes. Mission You can feel that you are doing so much better after you've been in therapy for awhile. The world constantly tests you on this. Don't be discouraged because you didn't handle something as well as you thought you could. It's probably still better than it once was. 6. Purpose - Compliance with treatment especially for young adults Imagine a tornado tearing through a street, knocking things down, turning things over, destroying homes, etc. Some things are left standing also. If you don’t take your illness seriously you will lay down a path of destruction. By the time you are in your 30’s or 40’s you will have made mistakes, harmed relationships, lost jobs, gotten involved with drugs or alcohol… Now you don’t just have the illness to fix but a lot of other problems. Also you now feel bad about yourself and have guilt and sorrow. Mission Take care of yourself now before your problems create greater problems. 7. Purpose - Contentment with your own company vs. emptiness when alone Empty Barrel (W) - link 8/1. The Wiser Path - link (neuroplasticity) (H) 8/2. Paths To Take - link (H) 9. PURPOSE - Therapist/Client Equality Explain that you and the client are both detectives. The client is in charge of bringing in all the evidence and placing it on the table, for both of you to sort through. The client also brings the truth. Only they can confirm that any deductions or solutions offered are correct. You bring your knowledge and analytical skills. The two of you work to make sense of it all. Mission Both of you are vital to the "investigation". 10. PURPOSE - Letting Go of the Last Pieces of a Problem Near the end of trauma work or any difficult subject matter, a client may look like they are mostly healed but remain stuck on not letting something go. The metaphor is sitting in a boat with a rope over the side holding an anchor. The rope is frayed and there are just these few threads left, but they are strong enough to hold the anchor. You have the scissors. If the threads are cut you are free and can float back to shore, and safety. Mission To be truly free there are some things you have to let go of. See: Letting Go Of Attachments. 
12. Purpose - Validation for obstacles interfering with progress.
Imagine a turtle who was injured early in life and it's head was stuck inside it's shell. It managed to survive somehow, but not without pain, discomfort, fears and isolation. After working on healing the injury, finally the head loosens and emerges. There is sunlight and green trees, blue, sparkling water, and other turtles. It is all amazing and the turtle thinks "I am never returning inside my shell". Then one day something comes along and shoves the head back in the shell, re-injuring the turtle. The despair is intense. It remembers how life used to be. It's even hard to imagine that any of the world outside was even real. Something is different though. It remembers how it freed it's head the first time and all it has learned since. The turtle frees it's head once more, this time more quickly and easily. Mission The road to recovery is not a straight line. One needs acceptance that healing will have challenges and moments of doubt and fear. Obstacles can be internal or external. Life will throw things at you that shows how healing can be fragile, but it strengthens with time. When it seems all is lost - it's not. 13. Purpose - Childhood options no longer effective in adulthood Imagine a child's life preserver that always kept the child's head above water. How long will that preserver hold up if enough weight is placed on it, and for how long? Childhood choices like hiding, running to your room or escaping into video games, may have helped to make it to the next day. Other defense or coping mechanisms like self-harm, or some that were not "choices", such as dissociating may have been necessary for survival, but these do not work as well and are often no longer needed when you are an adult. The responsibilities and expectations of an adult are quite different. A child's life preserver is not meant to be worn by an adult, just as many survival skills can no longer hold up the weight of adults. 14. Purpose - To explain acting "without" thinking In the story of the tortoise and the hare, who won the race? The slow, plodding, steadily moving tortoise made it to the finish line. The hare, who was much faster and agile could have run the race in a quarter of the time if it had the same traits as the tortoise, but it didn’t. The hare did not have the same focus or intention. It was filled with certainty of its own win, and had no faith in the possibility of the tortoise’s ability to win. People can learn the best choice for how to act, react, manage situations, cope with life. They can gain self-awareness and know the truth about their lives past and present. All this wisdom is ready to be thought, right there in their prefrontal cortex, right inside their forehead, right where the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow was pointing when he realized that he did have a brain. The prefrontal cortex is the tortoise. The amygdala is the hare. It works very fast and can have great strength. It can help a person react to a situation at a heightened level. If there is danger it can move as fast as the Flash, defend like Muhammed Ali or play dead like a possum. The problem comes in with what feeds it. Evolution has provided the natural insight that we should run from a predator, but our past experiences also give us a whole list of things that cause us to react quickly. Perhaps the hare in this story had a cocky attitude because of how it was raised, and a different hare would have easily won the race. The same thing can be true for people. The amygdala works faster than our prefrontal cortex. When there is a perceived threat we act before considering the big picture, the consequences, or the truth of the matter. If you’ve had a life filled with abuse, you tend to see the potential for abuse in situations that might actually be innocuous. You don’t stop and think what’s really going on here, this is their problem, not mine, will I cause myself more problems than it’s worth. You just act and then you’re left with regret. Mission The good news is that if there’s a second race, the tortoise can learn and train itself to manage the race differently, and win. |
